What Happen[ed] in Vegas - Parallels Summit 2013

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority says, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas," but we absconded from Caesars Palace with far too many pictures and videos from Parallels Summit to adhere to their suggestion. Over the course of three days, attendees stayed busy with presentations, networking sessions, parties, cocktails and (of course) the Server Challenge II. And thanks to Alan's astute questions in The Hangover, we didn't have to ask if the hotel was pager-friendly, whether a payphone bank was available or if Caesar actually lived at the hotel ... We could focus on the business at hand.

This year, Parallels structured the conference around three distinct tracks — Business, Technical and Developer — to focus all of the presentations for their most relevant audiences, and as a result, Parallels Summit engaged a broader, more diverse crowd than ever before. Many of the presentations were specifically geared toward the future of the cloud and how businesses can innovate to leverage the cloud's potential. With all of that buzz around the cloud and innovation, SoftLayer felt right at home. We were also right at home when it came to partying.

SoftLayer was a proud sponsor of the massive Parallels Summit party at PURE Nightclub in Caesar's palace on the second night of the conference. With respect to the "What Happens in Vegas" tagline, we actually powered down our recording devices to let the crowd enjoy the jugglers, acrobats, drinks and music without fear of incriminating pictures winding up on Facebook. Don't worry, though ... We made up for that radio silence by getting a little extra coverage of the epic Server Challenge II competition.

More than one hundred attendees stepped up to reassemble our rack of Supermicro servers, and the competition was fierce. The top two times were fifty-nine hundredths of a second apart from each other, and it took a blazingly fast time of 1:25.00 to even make the leader board. As the challenge heated up, we were able to capture video of the top three competitors (to be used as study materials for all competitors at future events):

It's pretty amazing to see the cult following that the Server Challenge is starting to form, but it's not very surprising. Given how intense some of these contests have been, people are scouting our events page for their next opportunity to step up to the server rack, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that people are mocking up their own Server Challenge racks at home to hone their strategy. A few of our friends on Twitter hinted that they're in training to dominate the next time they compete, so we're preparing for the crowds to get bigger and for the times to keep dropping.

If you weren't able to attend the show, Parallels posted video from two of the keynote presentations, and shared several of the presentation slide decks on the Parallels Summit Agenda. You might not get the full experience of networking, partying or competing in the Server Challenge, but you can still learn a lot.